Attempting to increase test environment access by building out staged test environments with conventional infrastructure can be extraordinarily expensive — which is a key reason why these constraints remain so prevalent. To help enterprises cost-effectively eliminate these constraints, Parasoft and Skytap have joined forces to deliver complete, production-like simulated test environments. All the systems that your organization can logistically image in the cloud are copied into an elastic Skytap environment; while those beyond the team’s scope or control (e.g., third-party applications, SAP, mainframes, not-yet-implemented services, etc.) are simulated into the environment via Parasoft Service Virtualization.

Unit, integration, functional, performance, and security testing can then be performed as early, often, and thoroughly as needed with Parasoft Continuous Testing, or apply your team’s tools of choice. Every team member can access the exact test environment he or she needs — without waiting for environment provisioning and test data setup, contending for shared resources, or worrying about impacting someone else’s work. Moreover, complete test environments can be invoked, copied and deployed as part of the continuous integration process, enabling a level of automated deployment and validation vital to continuous release processes.

Common use cases

Agile and parallel development: Avoid the process bottlenecks that commonly occur when teams are developing/testing interconnected system components in parallel by simulating elements that are missing our unavailable for testing

Performance testing: To rapidly configure realistic and consistent transaction performance from dependent system components as well as avoid the often-exorbitant access fees and wait times associated with performance testing

Mobile testing: To simulate the behavior of both internal networks and telecom networks that are outside the control of developers and testers

End-to-end functional testing: To provide access to all the distributed system components involved in the end-to-end transaction, within the necessary configurations — whenever the team is ready to test